Jesse Trentadue is the Salt Lake City attorney
who recently won a million dollar lawsuit against FBI for the wrongful death of his brother who was tortured to death by FBI agents. During the trial and the discovery process Trentadue obtained FBI documents that show they were handling Timothy McVeigh before the Oklahoma City bombing.After the trial Trentadue got a court order allowing him to take a video deposition fron Terry Nichols and Paul Hammer. Both men have identified FBI agents involved with MvVeigh before the bombing including FBI agent Larry Potts.
FBI agents refuse to allow Trentadue to take the video deposition.

The FBI on Monday denied editing security camera videos from the Oklahoma City bombing case.
Multimedia
Videoview all videos

Surveillance Video: Southwestern Bell

Surveillance video from the Southwestern Bell building. FBI has...

Surveillance video: Downtown Library

Surveillance video from the Oklahoma City downtown public...

09/27/2009 The FBI has released long-secret security tapes that give new glimpses into the chaos during the minutes after the Oklahoma City bombing. None show the...
* Lawyer says Oklahoma City bombing tapes edited
09/28/2009 A Utah attorney claims the FBI edited some security camera videotapes from the morning of the Oklahoma City bombing before releasing the recordings to him....

The FBI this summer released more than 20 recordings to Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue who is doing his own inquiry into the attack. The soundless recordings came from security cameras in operation in downtown Oklahoma City on the days before and on the morning of the bombing.

None show the actual explosion of a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building at 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995. Trentadue claims some cameras go blank about the same time before 9:02 a.m. He said Sunday that was "evidence that there is something there that the FBI doesn’t want anybody to see.”

An FBI spokesman said Monday, "The FBI made no edits or redactions in the processing of these videos. The tapes are typical security cameras — the view switches camera to camera every few seconds.”

The Oklahoman obtained the recordings from Trentadue. The recordings – which cover several hours — received national attention Sunday and Monday after The Oklahoman put excerpts online. The explosion resulted in 168 deaths.

Trentadue has contended in the past the FBI is covering up that agents knew about the bomb plot from informants but failed to prevent the attack. Federal officials have consistently denied the government had any prior knowledge of the attack.

We brought Dr Frederick Whitehurst to speak at Harvard Law School. He blew the whistle on how bad the FBI lab is run. He worked there for over 15 years.
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1st read
September 29, 2009
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Duct tape found on the mouth of slain toddler Caylee Anthony was contaminated by an FBI evidence examiner, raising questions about how it will be used in prosecuting the 2-year-old girl's mother for the murder.

The disclosure of the contaminated duct tape was among hundreds of pages of evidence released Tuesday by the State Attorney's Office in Orlando.

Danielle Tavernier, a spokeswoman for the State Attorney's Office, says she cannot comment on the documents.

Caylee's mother, 23-year-old Casey Anthony, has been charged with killing the girl. She has pleaded not guilty and claimed that a baby sitter kidnapped Caylee.

Amazon.com Review
Two crusading journalists investigate the FBI's forensic crime lab and deliver a strong indictment against what goes on there. Federal agents regularly dupe the public into accepting "scientific" findings that aren't based upon science at all, they charge, and the lab is infected with a troubling culture where truth plays second fiddle to prosecutorial interests, with information potentially useful to defendants withheld. The book's hero is FBI-scientist-turned-whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst, and most of the chapters focus on the crime lab's controversial role in high-profile cases involving O.J. Simpson, the World Trade Center bombing, the Unabomber, and others. The authors at times appear to have a pro-prosecution bias of their own, but their conclusions shouldn't be ignored. They probably won't be; as one attorney tells the authors, "No defense lawyer in the country is going to take what the FBI lab says at face value anymore.

The FBI is investigating an alleged police beating of a teenage runaway from a Rhode Island probationary program, the boy's lawyer says.

Robert Laren told The Providence Journal agents met with him and his 16-year-old client last week at the state Training School, where the boy is incarcerated for violating probation.

The boy says Woonsocket police officers beat him first in World War II Memorial State Park in Woonsocket on Sept. 15 and then in a back room at the police station. He has been charged with assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.

The newspaper learned of the alleged beating from Chief Family Court Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr. The teenager told the judge he had been beaten, kicked and repeatedly shot with a stun gun.

Laren said the boy's nose was broken and bones around his eye fractured. He said as many as six police officers may have committed felony assault.

The Woonsocket internal affairs department is also conducting its own investigation.

The teen, who has a record of several arrests, had been placed in a probationary program after being released from the training school.

Retired FBI agent Edward Preciado-Nuno is ordered to stand trial for killing his son's estranged girlfriend, but can be freed on bail.

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A judge has decided that a 61-year-old retired FBI agent will stand trial in the hammer slaying of his son's estranged girlfriend last November. But the judge also ruled that Edward Preciado-Nuno can be freed on house arrest if he posts a $250,000 bail.

Preciado-Nuno is accused of killing Kimberly Long in
a confrontation to try to evict her from his son's home. He claims
he hit Long in self-defense after she attacked him.

Law
Whistleblower’s Letter to Holder Reveals Corruption in Siegelman Prosecution

By Roger Shuler
The Public Record
Sep 29th, 2009

Leura Canary, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, wrote press releases about the prosecution of Gov. Don Siegelman that were distributed under the signature of assistant prosecutor Louis Franklin. Also, Canary regularly had two assistants communicate her suggestions about Siegelman’s case to Franklin.

All of this took place after Canary had announced her recusal from the Siegelman case. And they are two of many stark examples of prosecutorial misconduct outlined in a letter dated June 1, 2009, from whistleblower Tamarah Grimes to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Eight days after writing the letter, Grimes was fired from her position as a paralegal for the Department of Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. So far, there is no indication that Holder has taken any action in the matter.

The complete Grimes letter can be viewed here.

Grimes tells Holder that Canary’s recusal claims were false regarding the prosecution of Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy in what became known as “The Big Case” in the Montgomery office. Patricia Snyder Watson, the district ethics officer and first assistant U.S. attorney, was a frequent conduit of information to and from Canary. Writes Grimes:

Mrs. Canary publicly stated that she maintained a “firewall” between herself and The Big Case. In reality, there was no “firewall.” Mrs. Canary maintained direct communication with the prosecution team, directed some actions in the case, and monitored the case through members of the prosecution team and Mrs. Watson.

Grimes said she regularly raised concerns with Watson about misconduct among prosecutors on the Siegelman case–to little effect:

Mrs. Watson advised me that The Big Case was the most important case in the office and that U.S. Attorney Leura Canary would grant prosecutors virtually unlimited latitude to obtain a conviction. Mrs. Watson told me that as a paralegal, I did not have standing to question the actions of a federal prosecutor, and that if Mrs. Canary found out that I had done so, I would certainly be disciplined for insubordination.

With the threat of disciplinary action hanging over her head, Grimes tried to ignore the misconduct. But it was hard to ignore overt negotiations of proposed testimony of key cooperating witnesses Nick Bailey and Lanny Young. The lead prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen P. Feaga, instructed investigators to meet with Bailey and Young frequently. Writes Grimes:

Mr. Feaga instructed the investigators how to approach the cooperating witnesses on a particular subject and specified what he needed the witness to say in order to support his prosecutorial theory. For instance, Mr. Feaga would say, “See if you can get him to say it like this . . . , ” “Ask him if he is comfortable saying it like this . . . ,” or “I need him to say it like this . . . .” The investigators would return from meeting with the cooperating witnesses to report to Mr. Feaga, who would send the investigators back with new instructions.

Grimes said she was not the only person concerned about prosecutors’ creative approach to the facts of the case:

I recall one of the investigators, FBI agent Keith Baker, commented on the conduct by saying, “There is truth, there are facts, and then there are “Feaga facts.”

“Feaga facts” apparently were present in what proved to be the key testimony against Siegelman and Scrushy:

I particularly recall one meeting in which cooperating witness Nick Bailey was persuaded to recall something that he claimed he did not actually recollect. The matter concerned a meeting between Governor Siegelman and Richard Scrushy, a check and supposed conversation, which eventually led to the convictions in The Big Case. Mr. Bailey repeatedly said he did not know and he was not sure. The prosecutors coaxed and pressured Mr. Bailey to “remember” their version of alleged events. Mr. Bailey appeared apprehensive and hesitant to disappoint the prosecutors.

After reading Grimes’ stunning letter to Holder, we are left with numerous questions, but these two jump out at us:

How could convictions possibly stand when the key witness clearly was coaxed into making statements regarding events that he did not actually recall?

Tamarah Grimes was fired eight days after writing this letter to Eric Holder. But the U.S. attorney general, our nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, apparently has done nothing about it. Why is Holder sitting on his hands when a DOJ whistleblower, who went right to the top with her concerns about prosecutorial misconduct, has clearly faced retaliation for speaking out? Does anyone in the Obama administration have a spine when it comes to matters of justice? Will anyone ever take steps to clean up the cesspool in Montgomery, Alabama?

Why has the Obama administration allowed Leura Canary to remain on the job?And here’s a really interesting question. Alabama’s two Republican U.S. senators, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, have objected to two highly-regarded nominees for the Middle District position–Michel Nicrosi and Joseph Van Heest. Why do Sessions and Shelby object so strongly to these nominees? Is it possible that a real federal prosecutor in Montgomery, Alabama, might unearth some unsavory activities related to Sessions and Shelby themselves? Why is Obama allowing Sessions and Shelby to hold the Middle District of Alabama hostage?

As John McCain once said, “Elections have consequences.” Well, Obama was elected president, and he should not allow Sessions and Shelby to hold up the appointment of a new federal prosecutor in Montgomery. He should nominate Nicrosi or Van Heest and move forward, kicking Leura Canary unceremoniously to the curb–where she belongs.

Roger Shuler, a regular contributor to The Public Record, resides in Birmingham, Alabama. A 1978 graduate of the University of Missouri, Shuler worked 11 years as a reporter and editor for the Birmingham Post-Herald before working 19 years in several editorial positions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He blogs at Legal Schnauzer.

By Brad Friedman on 9/28/2009 5:08PM
Former FBI Agent Confirms: Bush State Official Was Target of 'Decade-Long' Espionage Probe
Longtime counterintel official acknowledges evidence behind key aspect of allegations against Marc Grossman made by former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds
Agency vet says investigation was 'buried and covered up,' calls for new investigation, 'accountability'...

George W. Bush's third-highest ranking State Department official, Marc Grossman, who became the Under Secretary of State after previously serving as Ambassador to Turkey, was targeted as part of a "decade-long investigation" by the FBI, according to an 18-year veteran manager of the agency's Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments.

For still-unknown reasons, the investigation, which also involved a multitude of cases involving Israeli espionage, was ultimately "buried and covered up," according to the official.

The comment from the former FBI official John M. Cole, in response to recent, stunning disclosures made by former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, helps to shore up a key aspect of her allegations. Cole is now calling for an investigation to help "bring about accountability" in the matter.

Edmonds' allegations of bribery, blackmail, and infiltration by foreign agents at the highest levels of the U.S. government were recently detailed in a remarkable cover story interview, as published last week by the American Conservative magazine.

"I read the recent cover story by The American Conservative magazine. I applaud their courage in publishing this significant interview," Cole says in his public response, as posted today at the AmCon website by interviewer and former CIA agent Philip Giraldi.

Cole then went on to verify his knowledge of the espionage investigation which, he says, included Grossman. Edmonds has long alleged he had been a key target in the agency's counterintelligence probe of the Turkish lobby and their relationship to current and former members of Congress and high-ranking officials in the Bush State and Defense Departments.

Cole also charges, in his brief comment, that the investigation was ultimately quashed by still-unnamed officials.

"I am fully aware of the FBI's decade-long investigation of the High-level State Department Official named in this article, Marc Grossman, which ultimately was buried and covered up," Cole notes, adding his call to re-open the matter. "It is long past time to investigate this case and bring about accountability."...

Grossman was specifically identified as a ring-leader in a very broad espionage scandal --- which includes the theft and sale of nuclear weapons technology to the foreign black market --- in a series of front-page exclusives by the UK Sunday Times in early 2008 (the stories can be found here, here and here). At the time, though the paper clearly identified the official in question, they didn't name him outright due to British libel laws. One of the co-authors of the series, Joe Lauria, has since confirmed the official in question was, indeed, Grossman.

The 2008 Sunday Times series detailed Edmonds' allegations that Bush's Under Secretary of State Grossman --- the third-highest ranking official in the State Department, after Colin Powell and Richard Armitage --- worked closely with both the Turks and Israel in obtaining and selling U.S. nuclear weapons technology on the worldwide black market, and that he had even tipped off Turkish diplomatic colleagues about the true identify of then-covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson's front company, Brewster Jennings, several years before the operation was named publicly by columnist Robert Novak.

Grossman, identified by the Times as "The senior official in the State Department [who] no longer works there," was quoted offering this non-denial denial of Edmonds' allegations in their report: "If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money that's outrageous. ... I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this."

So far, Grossman has yet to respond to The BRAD BLOG's requests for comment as sent to his lobbying firm, The Cohen Group, where he now serves as Vice Chairman.

"Mastering the complex and often veiled dynamic where government, politics, media, and business intersect requires a rare combination of knowledge, skills and experience," the Cohen Group's website announces on their "Expertise" page. "Our Principals bring centuries of experience at the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Congress."

Founded in 2001 by President Bill Clinton's former Republican Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, the page goes on to note: "The Cohen Group's reach extends internationally where our Principals have developed great expertise and relationships with key political, economic and business leaders and acquired valuable experience with the individuals and institutions that affect our clients' success abroad."

Grossman's "veiled dynamic" and "acquired valuable experience" with "key political, economic and business leaders" may well have been in play during the time he served as Under Secretary of State, according to the startling charges levied by the former FBI translator Edmonds.

In the American Conservative interview, she details a great many specifics about the way the she says the spy ring actually worked, and claims that Grossman was a key player who, at times, would receive bags of cash from foreign operatives. Here's some of the discussion pertaining to Grossman from the recent interview:
PHILIP GIRALDI: We were very interested to learn of your four-hour deposition in the case involving allegations that Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accepted money from the Turkish government in return for political favors. You provided many names and details for the first time on the record and swore an oath confirming that the deposition was true.

Basically, you map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. These agents were able to obtain information that was either used directly by those foreign governments or sold to third parties, with the proceeds often used as bribes to breed further corruption. Let's start with the first government official you identified, Marc Grossman, then the third highest-ranking official at the State Department.

SIBEL EDMONDS: During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. Because the FBI had had no Turkish translators, these files were archived, but were considered to be very important operations. As part of the background, I was briefed about why these operations had been initiated and who the targets were.

Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as "Susurluk" by the media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.

Another individual who was working for Grossman, Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, was also removed from Turkey and sent to Germany. After he and his Turkish wife Can returned to the U.S., he went to work for Douglas Feith and she was hired as an FBI Turkish translator. My complaints about her connection to Turkish lobbying groups led to my eventual firing.

Grossman and Dickerson had to leave the country because a big investigation had started in Turkey. Special prosecutors were appointed, and the case was headlined in England, Germany, Italy, and in some of the Balkan countries because the criminal groups were found to be active in all those places. A leading figure in the scandal, Mehmet Eymür, led a major paramilitary group for the Turkish intelligence service. To keep him from testifying, Eymür was sent by the Turkish government to the United States, where he worked for eight months as head of intelligence at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. He later became a U.S. citizen and now lives in McLean, Virginia. The central figure in this scandal was Abdullah Catli. In 1989, while "most wanted" by Interpol, he came to the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct his operations until 1996.

GIRALDI: So Grossman at this point comes back to the United States. He's rewarded with the third-highest position at the State Department, and he allegedly uses this position to do favors for "Turkish interests"-both for the Turkish government and for possible criminal interests. Sometimes, the two converge. The FBI is aware of his activities and is listening to his phone calls. When someone who is Turkish calls Grossman, the FBI monitors that individual's phone calls, and when the Turk calls a friend who is a Pakistani or an Egyptian or a Saudi, they monitor all those contacts, widening the net.

EDMONDS: Correct.

GIRALDI: And Grossman received money as a result. In one case, you said that a State Department colleague went to pick up a bag of money…

EDMONDS: $14,000

GIRALDI: What kind of information was Grossman giving to foreign countries? Did he give assistance to foreign individuals penetrating U.S. government labs and defense installations as has been reported? It's also been reported that he was the conduit to a group of congressmen who become, in a sense, the targets to be recruited as "agents of influence."

EDMONDS: Yes, that's correct. Grossman assisted his Turkish and Israeli contacts directly, and he also facilitated access to members of Congress who might be inclined to help for reasons of their own or could be bribed into cooperation.
...
GIRALDI: So the network starts with a person like Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies?

EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces. One Air Force major I remember was going through a really nasty divorce and a child custody fight. They detailed all different kinds of vulnerabilities.

Later on in the interview, Edmonds also claims that Grossman similarly "took care" of others, outside of the government, even, she says, contacts at the New York Times. "Grossman would brag, 'We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.'"

She later elaborated on that point to The BRAD BLOG, explaining that this "also happened with the Washington Post, but the New York Times was their primary one for this."

"Every time they wanted something on Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan, for example, they just faxed it over [to the Times], and it was run under their own guys' name, even though it was written by the State Department," she told us. "This was an ongoing operation, at least during a four year period of time" from 1997 to 2001."

There is much more on Grossman in the full AmCon interview, as well as in Edmonds' recent under-oath deposition given in early August, in the Schmidt v. Krikorian case now pending before the Ohio Election Commission. Her sworn deposition, both transcript and video, was published in full by The BRAD BLOG here.

Previously, Edmonds had been twice-gagged by the Bush Justice Department's use of the draconian, so-called "State Secrets Privilege", after she was fired by the FBI when she alerted superiors about a co-worker in her department who had been a member of one of the Turkish organizations being targeted by the FBI's counterintelligence probe in the Turkish division.

Following the dismissal, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), then senior members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote letters on her behalf to the DoJ, seeking an investigation into her allegations.

The DoJ's Inspector General would ultimate release a de-classified version of his report finding a number of Edmonds' allegations to be "credible," "serious," and "warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI."

In 2002, during a CBS 60 Minutes report on the Edmonds case, Grassley was asked about Edmonds' credibility, and responds by saying: "Absolutely, she's credible...And the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story."

While we don't know if Cole was one of those "within the FBI" who "corroborated a lot of" Edmonds story at the time to Grassley and Leahy, but he has certainly done so today.

September 29, 2009
McChrystal's Infomercial
60 Minutes and the General

By BRUCE JACKSON

David Martin’s 13-minute “60 Minutes” interview with General Stanley McChrystal (September 27), the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, may have seemed like one more of those insufferable Sunday evening puff pieces, like Steve Kroft’s strokejob with Clarence Thomas in September 2007 and Morley Safer’s with Bobby Jindahl in March 2009. As in the Kroft and Safer interviews, Martin never asked a question that went faster than slowball and he spent the whole time playing hagiographer and straight-man. He never asked one significant follow-up question. If he’d been a flack for DoD editing this piece in the Pentagon studio he couldn’t have done a better job.

But the interview was more than just another “60 Minutes” puff piece. Four-star battlefront generals don’t put on dog-and-pony shows for reporters without a very good reason for doing so, and he put on a very fancy show for Martin, with stops at his room, his office, his briefing room, trips in his helicopter and SUV, and much more. It’s difficult to imagine that McChrystal’s reason was anything other than putting pressure on the Obama administration to give him the series of very large troop increases he thinks he needs to win his war.

McChrystal makes the Westmoreland argument for more American troops, and Martin doesn’t seem remember we’ve heard all this before. The words “Viet Nam” were never uttered once in the interview by either man, even though you could go through it and substitute “Viet Nam” for “Afghanistan” and again and again (if you’re old enough) you’d say, “But I heard exactly these lines before.” Yes, you did.

At 55, McChrystal is five years older than Westmoreland was when he took over as military commander in Viet Nam. He’s also better educated. If McChrystal doesn’t talk about the past it’s because he chooses to leave it where it is, not because he isn’t aware of it. He went to West Point, has an MA from the Naval War College and an MS in international relations from Salve Regina University; he spent a year at the Kennedy School of Government and another at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before his current assignment he was perhaps best known for two things: announcing at one of his regular 2003 Pentagon press briefings on the progress of the Iraq war, ‘I could anticipate that the major combat engagements are over,” and for heading the unit that found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarquai, Task Force 6-26. That unit was notorious for its frequent use of torture in interrogations. McChrystal was also involved in the cover up of the Pat Tillman friendly fire incident.

Martin addresses none of that. He mentions the killing of al-Zaquari (but not the torture), only as part of a riff on how brave a warrior McChrystal is.

Martin and McChrystal look more than a little bit alike. They both have long skinny faces. Sometimes when the camera cut back and forth from one to the other it seemed like the same actor, tricked up to look like two different people. Martin has a grey crew cut and wears glasses; McChrystal has very short combed down brown hair, no glasses except when he’s looking at a map and, maybe when no cameras are around. Martin is kind of moony and dour, while McChrystal is all quick moves, no qualifiers in his speech, a guy looks you right in the eye.

In his intro, Martin tells us that a man who must be “America’s most battle-hardened general” says “there must be a change in the way we operate.” Later he tells us that the general is intrepid (when he meets with local officials who aren’t wearing body armor he doesn’t wear body armor either), athletic, and that, “as he races against the calendar” he is a “one of a kind commander.”

“It’s hard to keep pace with McChrystal as he races through his marathon day,” gushes Martin. “He eats one meal a day. Anything more makes him feel sluggish. In another life he could have been a monk.” The general shows Martin what seems to be his living quarters: a single room, sparsely furnished.

“What you’re about to hear is as closed to an unvarnished war briefing as you’re likely to get,” Martin tells us. I think he was trying to convey the idea that the general is going to be telling it like it is, directly and with no waffling or fudging. But that’s not what a war briefing is (nor is it what the general delivers). A war briefing for the staff is the CO standing in front of the room, running the show, and letting get said only what he thinks ought to get said, while the underlings keep their place and speak when spoken to. If it’s for the press, it’s smoke and mirrors. (Remember the reports of the “Doha follies” in Gulf War I? The military would have press briefings every day, then everybody would look at Al Jazeera to find out what was really going on.) Martin doesn’t seem to remember that “war briefings” are strategic events, not teaching seminars.

McChrystal poses at his desk, flipping through pages in a red binder marked “secret.” But, Martin says, he doesn’t trust that to tell him what’s going on, so three times each week he gets on a helicopter to see for himself.”

Then he tells us, “Flying over terrain that has defeated invaders from the British to the Soviets, McChrystal knows he has to do more than just fine-tune the strategy that after eight years of war appears on the brink of failure.” Martin, who was an English major at Yale and who is CBS News’ national security correspondent, should do better than that. The Brits were newcomers to Afghanistan: they didn’t get there until 1836. Outsiders started getting whipped by the fractious Afghanistan tribes at least as early as Alexander the Great in 330 BC. The place has never been colonized and none of the great armies got to stay as long as they would have liked or went home with as many soldiers as they’d brought.

We see Martin and McChrystal side by side in a helicopter, then side by side in the back seat of a SUV. The guys in front wear helmets and body armor. McChrystal never, in the segment, wears body armor or carries a firearm. One time, in a market, he even makes the troops guarding him move back out of camera range. “The greatest risk we can accept,” McChrystal says in the SUV, “is to lose support of the people here. If the people are against us, we cannot be successful.” Conventional war, Martin says, paraphrasing McChrystal, and once again missing an opportunity to ask him about torture as a weapon of war, “can never win this war…. In other words, for much of the past eight years, the US has been sowing the seeds of its own demise.”
PART 1

Sound familiar? How about LBJ forty years ago, telling us the technique we’ll use to win the war in Viet Nam: “The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who live there.”

In order to do his job, McChrystal “relentlessly pounded away at the Pentagon bureaucracy,” desk-jockeys who move too slowly and decide too late. How many times did General William Westmoreland kvetch about the desk jockeys back in D.C. and how they slowed him down?

McChrystal is not only a good commander in the field; he is also acutely tuned to image management on the base. The U.S. military HQ used to drop its flags to half-mast every time an American or soldier fighting with the Americans were killed. He stopped that. He had two reasons. One, they were having flags “at half-mast all the time, and two, it meant they were looking back rather than ahead…We’d gotten to a point where the flags were flying at half-mast all the time and I believe that a force that’s fighting a war can’t spend all its time looking back at what the costs have been, they’ve got to look ahead and they’ve got to have their confidence. And I thought it was important that the flags be up where they belong.”

If you look ahead and don’t look back, how do you learn anything? You’re doomed to make it up as you go, and to make the same mistakes every one of those generals since Alexander made. No wonder neither of these guys mentioned Viet Nam. If the mounting number of casualties in Afghanistan would be depressing and bring the costs of this sort of adventure to mind, what would remembering Viet Nam do to morale? Keep the flags at the top of the masts: it’s a piece with the Bush administration’s ukase against photographing returning U.S. war dead. If you don’t see it you won’t know it and if you don’t know it you won’t be depressed by it. (Do you hear Bob Dylan singing, “ “Shut the eyes of the dead not to embarrass anyone?”)

Then Martin delivers what for McChrystal is the money shot of the entire interview. After this unquestioning advertisement for the intrepid Spartan who doesn’t even wear eyeglasses except when he’s looking at a map, and over an image of troops in the field, Martin says, “McChrystal is hostage to geography. Afghanistan is bigger than Iraq, yet he has only half as many troops. He plans to double the size of Afghan forces to 400,000, but that will take years. The only place he can get the troops he needs now is from the United States.”

More troops is what McChrystal wants, he wants them now, and this infomercial on “60 Minutes” is a key element in his campaign to get them.

On August 30, a month before the “60 Minutes” segment aired, McChrystal sent Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates a confidential 66-page report on the Afghanistan situation, “Commander’s Initial Assessment”. That report was soon leaked to the Washington Post and reported on by Bob Woodward (“McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure,” 21 September).

In it, McChrystal wrote: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) while Afghan security capacity matures risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible…. Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or ‘doubling down’ on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we thinking and operate…. Our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population.”

“Resources will not win this war,” McChrystal wrote, “but under-resourcing could lose it.” Which suggests that at the key lesson he learned from Westmoreland in Vietnam was not to stay or get out of wars you can’t win, but make sure that when it’s over you can put the blame on the politicians, and to get your line out before they have a chance to get to no.

Who do you think leaked the confidential 66-page memorandum to Bob Woodward? Perhaps someone in the Obama administration, but that is not known as a leaky administration and Obama’s staff had no reason to do it and several good reasons not to, one of which is that it helps the Pentagon put additional public pressure on them at a time when they’re trying to find a way out of what is rapidly becoming a quagmire. Iraq, a war Stanley McChrystal told us was pretty much over seven years ago, is a training exercise compared to the difficulties we face in Afghanistan.

McChrystal’s confidential report went public in the Post one week before the “60 Minutes” segment.

After the report was leaked and Woodward wrote about it, Obama announced that he wants a full-scale reevaluation of the Afghanistan war. Joe Biden has been consistent in arguing for a drawdown of U.S. forces there. McChrystal was, several sources said, told not to make any requests for more troops until that reevaluation was completed.

The general must have decided that was a suggestion rather than a direct order, because last week he flew to Germany to hand-deliver to the head of the Joint Chiefs a request for 45,000 more troops, which would bring the U.S. force there to 113,000. That was two days before the “60 Minutes” segment telling us what a perfect general he is aired.

McChrystal is an impressive commander. He makes a good argument for more troops, and he works the press brilliantly. William Westmoreland was also an impressive commander. He also made a good argument for more troops. Up to a point, he got them. As it turned out, everyone would have been better off if LBJ had said no the first time the request was made.

There is a scene in the “60 Minutes” segment where we see McChrystal on his daily 5AM 60 minute jog around his compound. He wears t-shirt and shorts, and what seem to be earphones connected to an iPod. If he’s really listening to music and not battle reports, someone should program this device so it plays over and over again, at least until he stops running and says, “I get it,” four lines from the final stanza of Bob Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again”:

An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.

Bruce Jackson edits the web journal BuffaloReport.com. His most recent books ares The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple University Press) and Cummins Wide: Photographs from the Arkansas Penitentiary (Center for Documentary Studies and Center Working Papers).

QUITO -- Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa announced September 28 he will receive six Mirage 50 jets "in good condition" donated by Venezuela, amid concerns of a South American arms race.

"Venezuela wants to give us six Mirage jets ... we are going to accept them," Correa said in the northern town of Ibarra.

Correa added that the country was discussing the purchase of a further 12 jets from South Africa and 24 Super Tucano fighters from Brazil, as well as radar systems and helicopters.

It is just the latest sign of a military build up in South America and what the United States has warned could become an arms race.

Venezuela, led by leftist President Hugo Chavez, recently announced a $2.2 billion from Russia to buy weapons.

The purchases have come as tensions have grown between Ecuador, its Venezuelan ally and Colombia over support of leftist Colombian rebels and Bogota's agreement to allow the United States to use Colombian military bases.